Global Swarming Honeybees: Bee Gardens

7.18.2007

Bee Gardens

The Wall Street Journal has just published an informative article on "bee gardens" and native pollinators (which the honeybee isn't, by the way—it's an import and an important import at that!). The associated video is worth checking out, too.

My one beef is that the article makes much of the "threat" of getting stung when attracting bees to the garden, going so far as to include a "sting pain index" for various types of bees. Honestly, getting stung by a nectaring bee is an absurdly overstated risk. Unless you are running around your garden like a maniac smacking down bees, they have much, much better things to do than mess with you.

It's a little like warning someone to be very, very careful about eating bananas due to the risk of slipping on the peel.

1 comment:

Abelisto said...: I couldn't agree more about the paranoia part. When I was a young naive child in Brooklyn NY, without a bit of bee paranoia to be found, I would gently catch foraging honey bees by hand...Yes... to get a closer look at them. (I was very gentle and inflicted no harm) I was never ever stung!; July 18, 2007 at 5:20 PM

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Quotes of Note

"The cynicism that you have is not your real soul."—Yoko Ono
"The country that elected George Bush — sort of — because he seemed like he’d be more fun to have a beer with than Al Gore or John Kerry is really getting its comeuppance."—Gail Collins
"How do you inherit the earth? By being awake."—Joni Mitchell
Causing the right amount of trouble is an art form.”—Judith Coche
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away."—Philip K. Dick
"A meddling beekeeper is said to be the bees' worst enemy, and this may be true."—Ormond Aebi, The Art and Adventure of Beekeeping
"For too long we have been locked in an old fashioned, reductionist approach, dealing with bees as if they were mere machines created solely for our benefit, instead of highly evolved, wild creatures, with which we are privileged to work."—Phil Chandler, The Barefoot Beekeeper
"Neither among the bees nor any other animals that have a ray of our intellect, do things happen with the precision our books record. Too many circumstances remain unknown to us."—Maurice Maeterlinck
"In these times, acceleration spoils everything."—Heinz-Klaus Metzger, Musicologist
"Whatever lofty things you might accomplish today, you will do them only because you first ate something that grew out of dirt."—Barbara Kingsolver
"Healthy, happy bees don't need any additives."—Dee A. Lusby
"When the bird and the book disagree, always believe the bird."—Audubon
"There is a certain valid moment for every cloud."—Paul Strand

"For the bee, honey is the ultimate reality. It represents the fulfillment of her life mission, the triumph over her enemies, the continuity of the hive, the justification for working herself to death. Honey is to bees what money in the bank is to people—a measure of prosperity and well-being. But there is nothing abstract or symbolic about honey, as there is about money, which has no intrinsic value. There is more real wealth in a pound of honey, or a load of manure for that matter, than all the currency in the world. We often destroy the world's real wealth to create an illusion of wealth, confusing symbol and substance."—Wm. Longgood, The Queen Must Die